PC Expo: Day 2

Page 2: Serial ATA

<B>Serial ATA</B>:
When I walked over to the Intel booth, which was one of the biggest ones at the show and right in the center as well, they were showing off alot of nice stuff ranging from their new 2Ghz mobile Pentium 4s to working serial ATA cards and drives. The Serial ATA spec as of now calls for 150MB/s of data transfer. What also was interesting to note is that Serial ATA is point to point meaning that you can only hook up one drive per connector, which is probably for the best because there is no need for jumpers or anything.

There are many benefits to Serial ATA over Parallel ATA. The first one being the cable. The 40/80 pin parallel is huge compared to the tiny 7 wire serial ATA wire. The second is performance. The Standard now is set at 150MB/s, by mid 2004 it'll be upgraded to 300MB/s and by mid 2007, up to 600MB/s and more. All will be backwards compatible of course. The third is longevity. Parallel ATA has run its course and all major hard drive manufactures will be producing Serial ATA compliant drives. Seagate already has a native Serial ATA drive. Serial ATA will be here within fall of this year and will be placed on most motherboards by mid 2003. This is the interface for the future.

<center><img src="http://www.aselabs.com/images/articles/june02/pcexpo2/satacompare.jpg">
If you can't tell, the red wire is SATA and the big grey one is PATA.</center>

<center><img src="http://www.aselabs.com/images/articles/june02/pcexpo2/sataconn.jpg">
Here is a working system with two drives installed through a PCI card Right above the connection to the hard drive is a new power connector as well.</center>

<center><img src="http://www.aselabs.com/images/articles/june02/pcexpo2/sataconn2.jpg">
This is another working system.</center>

<center><img src="http://www.aselabs.com/images/articles/june02/pcexpo2/satastream.jpg">
Here is a computer streaming 4 large movie files >200MBs each, no caching going on there. All are being played very smoothly so SATA is doing its job nicely.</center>

I was going to show you some more stuff but this is the better stuff of the day. Tomorrow I'll do a wrap up with all the other things that I saw. Please give me some feedback on the coverage that I'm doing as it helps me alot.